“I haven’t seen any figures but when I visited an EE store to see how fast it was all I saw was technofreaks in there," said Colao. "I haven’t heard any calls from friends, colleagues of businesses that we need this fast internet. With the increase in data speeds of HSPA+ (a faster version of 3G), an early LTE network won’t be much different.”

The cable form most hard pressed for bandwidth is DSL, as you can only transmit so much over 2 thin copper wires. The actual amount of frequency those two wires can carry, is very limited. Which is why it's hard to find a DSL/ADSL line much over 10Mb/s, even then you're real limited on upload speeds.

Coaxial cable on the other hand, actually can carry a LOT of bandwidth. Something in the area of 6Gb/s, if all 6Mhz channels are set for data usage. Thats not counting a cable companies trunk, and backbone lines, which will contain several Coax runs.

OTA and Cell phone bandwidth is limited by available spectrum that is usable by private and commercial entities. Only certain spectrums are really suitable for long range OTA broadcast as well, those usually being the lower frequencies. And with a lower frequency, comes lower bandwidth available per channel.

Coaxial cable is far different than plain old twisted or non-twisted pair. Coax has a specific electrical impedance that results in high signal integrity across the run. That allows higher bandwidth through because of reduced phase distortion in the higher frequencies.

quote: Coax is copper... And they certainly can push higher speeds over copper..they choose not to.

Not exactly.

You see on copper speeds degrade with distance due to attenuation of the signal, the farther you are away from a DSLAM the slower the maximum connection speed becomes.

In Australia for instance allot of DSL providers are "Uncapped" speed wise, so people sign up for DSL and they will generally get the best possible speeds that their phone line allows.

Now, those who are close to something like a DSLAM may be achieving the maximum speeds available on the 24mbps ADSL 2+ and hence something like VDSL may actually be beneficial, but generally don't expect 100mbps+ over your copper phone line any time soon unless providers are willing to place "Mini exchanges" equipped with VDSL on every street corner.